Category Archives: Psychology

An Australian psychologist David Roland , has written a book about his recovery from stroke – How I Rescued My Brain. In the book he describes how he effectively rewired his brain to be arguably better than it was before the medical trauma.

He used brain-training programs to regain basic auditory skills. And he practised mindfulness meditation: “The evidence is pretty clear,” he told the Express, “even in an eight-week programme, that it changes your brain structure long-term.”

He also ensured that he exercised, enjoyed good sleep routines, ate well and listened to music. “Listening to music is a little bit of magic for the brain, as countless studies have proved,” the Express reported. “Scientists believe it’s because music activates lots of brain regions at once – attention, memory, verbal, emotion and meaning. One study in Finland among stroke patients who listened to music every day for two months found they had better verbal memory and focused attention after the trial.”

Roland’s tale is inspirational and the methods he used are available to all. Meditation and relaxation are much more than enjoyable states of mind and body, they’re drivers of beneficial effects throughout out entire biology.

Some people have asked about using parts of the Sleep Well Hypnotically album for general meditation, relaxation and mindfulness purposes. It sounds a good idea to me, so I’ve enabled individual purchase of the tracks on the album direct from CD Baby.

Good to see someone else in Cornwall latching onto the use of Binaural beat technology. Inner Beats are launching a series of tracks using binaural technology to induce various states: sleep, relaxation, study, energisation. Story reported in Western Morning News.

I too use binaural beats embedded in music in the majority of my therapy downloads – a lot of my clients loved them.

Psychological research into sleep sometimes offers us fresh insights into the benefits of good sleep, and sometimes it reinforces widely held beliefs.

It seems obvious, for instance, that a good night’s sleep is necessary for health, well-being and optimal performance. And recent studies on shift work and sleeping patterns back-up this common sense belief.

The British Medical Journal’s Occupational & Environmental Medicine publication demonstrates that disrupted sleep due to shift work can prematurely age the brain and result in cognitive problems. Ten years on antisocial shifts can age the brain an extra six and a half years – it takes five years of normal sleep patterns to recover.

This is one more thing for insomniacs to worry about (as if they didn’t already worry enough), as some of them will end up with lifestyles emulating the worst of shift work sleeping patterns. My free eBook and accompanying audio download Sleep Well Hypnotically (on sale here at CDBaby as well as Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk & iTunes) is designed to provide psychological support for establishing healthy sleeping patterns. It is based on years of experience working with clients on a one-to-one basis and has worked well for many people already.

Hypnotherapy, psychological interventions and music to help overcome sleeping problems

Getting a good night’s sleep is important, not only because it makes us feel human the next day, but also because our physical and psychological health depend on it.
Hypnotherapy is a very useful psychological tool for combatting stress and effectively restoring our ability to go to sleep to its factory default.

In this audio, I have packaged some tried and tested methods and techniques from my work with individual clients who have successfully overcome insomnia. There are breathing exercises, with music, designed to counter the effects of stress, a quick method of self-hypnosis, a visualisation process, and a formal hypnotherapy session. There’s even a lullaby.

You can explore the contents of the album and make your own playlists as you go along. However, there is also a free eBook which accompanies the recording and contains extra background detail and a suggested plan for using the audio tracks. It can be downloaded from here.

The audio download is available through most download stores or direct from CD Baby

Sleep Well Hypnotically is an audio download with an accompanying free eBook that uses psychology and hypnotherapy to help those with sleeping problems resolve them and get a good night’s sleep.

It also has some groovy choons to help the processes.

Insomnia is very common. In Western industrialised societies around one third of the population have periods of insomnia in their lives.

There are some typical patterns to insomnia. Some people find it difficult to go to sleep, maybe lying awake for a long time before drifting off and then sleeping for only a short while. Some people keep waking up throughout the night and feel they’ve had hardly any rest. Others wake early in the morning.

In this audio and eBook, I have packaged some tried and tested methods and techniques from my work with individual clients who have successfully overcome insomnia. There are breathing exercises, with music, designed to counter the effects of stress, a quick method of self-hypnosis, a visualisation process, and a formal hypnotherapy session. There’s even a lullaby…

This is the music I use in my one-to-one hypnotherapy and coaching sessions with clients. It uses binaural beat technology and has been designed to aid the listener to go into trance easily. It can be used as a single-play track for a short session, looped to any length required in your mp3 player, or combined with other tracks I have composed as a background for relaxation, trance or creative work.

Synchronizing your breathing with this music, and concentrating on using your diaphragm to breathe out fully, will help switch on the Relaxation Response (a physiological response described by Dr Herbert Benson building on the work of Nobel Laureate Dr Walter Heiss and his own research at Harvard medical School) which is the physiological key to activating the parasympathetic nervous system and beginning to counter the bio-chemical effects of stress. This response is one of the reasons why meditation and similar trance states are so good at helping alleviate many stress-related conditions.

This track also uses binaural beat technology and has been designed to aid the listener to go into trance easily. It can be used as a single-play track for a short session, looped to any length required in your mp3 player, or combined with other tracks I have composed as a background for relaxation, trance or creative work.

Relaxation Response is available via iTunes and Amazon or direct from CD Baby

+++Rapid Relaxation – 3min 30sec

Some users of the Relaxation Response single said that they found it difficult to get into meditative 7-11 breathing straightaway, particularly when they are highly stressed or agitated.

Rapid Relaxation is designed to lead the listener quickly into relaxing meditative brainwave states by combining music and binaural beat technology with structured breath-deepening. The structure of the stage-shift cycle is from a high-energy state of everyday beta consciousness through the deep theta relaxation characteristic of near-sleep to a relaxed meditative alpha state that helps to fire the Relaxation Response and all the physiological and psychological benefits that entails.

To move from a state of high energy to one of relaxation, simply synchronise your breathing with that on the audio, inhaling with the rising tune and exhaling as it falls, pushing those last bits of air out of your lungs with your diaphragm.

Music and voice for relaxation, meditation, self-hypnosis and self-development

Combining hypnotic words and music, the content of this audio has been effective for many of my clients who have used it to make all sorts of changes in their life from increasing self- esteem and confidence through overcoming limiting beliefs to breaking unwanted habits.

Instead of a hypnosis audio that treats a single specific issue, this one uses permissive Ericksonian language to enable anyone with any issue to get their unconscious and conscious minds to work together.

If you have a problem with how you think, feel or behave and want to make changes in your life, you can easily bring that problem with you as you listen in privacy to “Relax And Change Hypnotically” while your unconscious mind begins generating solutions for you.

This relaxing hypnosis audio is based on Milton Erickson’s hypnotic interview technique and Robert Dilts’ SCORE framework for initiating change processes.

There are many introductory textbooks on the market aimed at newcomers to the field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Unfortunately, I find few of them worth recommending to students on the courses I teach. Damian Hamill’s book, however, went straight onto my reading lists because it succeeds where so many other books fail.

For a start, he gets the underlying science and psychology right – it always helps if an author actually knows what he’s talking about. Similarly when talking about psychotherapeutic models, Damian Hamill eschews psycho-babble in favour of concise and accurate language. Just as importantly, he gets the ethics right too. In an area still tainted by quackery and charlatanism this is vital.

As a master practitioner and trainer of NLP, he has a particular theoretical perspective which he brings to bear on the subject. He also brings other perspectives to bear, but does so in a well-balanced way, neither attempting to hide them nor engaging in tub-thumping for any school.

The end result is a text that is concise, authoritative, informative and well-written. Feedback from my students has been positive.

Damian Hamill – An Introduction To Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy (eBookIt.com) is available at Amazon & iTunes book stores.